Man has long domesticated animals and kept them as pets. There is good reason. Pets offer companionship and protection, a sense of inter-dependency and need, love and loyalty; feelings perhaps not so readily found, in other living things. Chief among the members of the animal kingdom with that status are cats. There is always at least one person among ones circle of acquaintances who owns one or more cats, attesting to the popularity of the feline.
The cat is regarded as a house animal; it usually stays indoors and inhabits the same areas as its owner. The modern person in a wealthy society lives in a comfortable home or apartment that is kept tidy. For the pet cat, provisions are made to allow the cat to relieve itself in-house without dirtying one's home. The "litter box" serves this purpose. It is a cat's "in-house" outhouse, so to speak.
The litter box or bin is a container or tray, having upstanding side walls and a bottom. A volume of granulated material, litter material, is spread over the bottom. The cat easily steps over the side wall and into the bin, relieves itself in the litter material, and then steps out.
Although a person walks away from an outhouse, the pet owner cannot avoid the "used" litter box. It must be cleaned or disposed of to avoid overwhelming fumes; a tolerated disadvantage to cat ownership. Clean-up requires removal of the litter and its discard suitably in a trash can. Cleaning the litter box is regarded as a messy undesirable job and could involve hand contact with the soiled litter. The present invention has the advantage of eliminating that hand contact.
An alternative to avoid hand contact with the litter is to use a disposable box. Because the box size may be cumbersome, disposal of the entire unit in an ordinary trash can be difficult. The present invention provides for a disposable litter box; one that is easy to handle and deposit in the trash can.
Litter material is widespread and popular with cat owners. It is sold in pet stores and in the modern supermarket, the latter being a bastion of "convenience" items and foods to which the modern consumer is "tuned"; a group which, of course, includes the cat owner. Typically, the litter material is sold in paper sacks in quantities of five through twenty-five pounds. Those sacks are heavy, difficult to carry and difficult to pack in with the groceries in the rear or trunk of the automobile. The present invention makes cartage of litter material easier.
The aforedescribed sequence of use and disposal is made more streamlined and convenient by a unitary package litter system which the invention provides; use commences with the purchase of the litter at the supermarket and continues to the ultimate disposal of the litter in the trash can.
In the prior art patent to Sweeney, U.S. Pat. No. 3,154,052 granted Oct. 27, 1964 for a disposable sanitary station for pet animals the subject of convenience in handling of litter material was addressed by providing a transformable litter box, which is also the subject of this specification. The Sweeney patent discloses a litter box made by folding a unitary cardboard blank to form a box or package that is filled with litter. The box may be opened to form a tray with the litter spread about the tray's bottom. After use, the tray is refolded to again define a closed package which is then disposed of in the trash. In this construction, the bottom or base of the tray contains a midsection that is relatively short and the associated side walls contain diagonal scores that criss cross one another.
A second patent to Sweeney, U.S. Pat. No. 3,170,618 granted Feb. 23, 1965 addresses those same goals with a transformable package of slightly different construction but which uses the criss crossed diagonal scores in the midsection side walls. In both packages, the side walls of the box entirely overlap side walls of a second portion of the box in the package configuration and form a generally rectangular cross section shape. Although teaching principles of transformability, Sweeney shows difficulties in the hinge portion about which the portions of the box are formed into the closed package shape.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,743,170 to Riccio is another example of a self contained disposable litter box which like in Sweeney contains three sections that are folded in a counterclockwise folding movement of the end section, carrying with it the midsection, to form a closed package; the cross section of the internal cavity being square shaped. Other than to note, the existence of differences in construction between the structure of the present invention and Sweeney and Riccio as becomes apparent in this specification, it is not possible to fully evaluate the merit or worth of Sweeney's solutions other than to note that such a structure does not appear currently in the market place. One may thus speculate that the Sweeney and Riccio structures have not achieved a suitable result; perhaps the package was not sufficiently sealed and permitted escape of some litter.
A principal object of the present invention is to provide a fold up litterbox system that allows easy disposal of soiled kitty litter without the need to touch that soiled litter and without leakage of loose soil.
An additional object of the invention is to provide a novel package or bin that can be changed from one configuration to the other and vice-versa by simple folding and unfolding the bin or package, respectively, by hand.
A still further object of the invention is to provide a corrugated paperboard unitary sheet design from which a transformable package to tray structure may be easily and inexpensively constructed.